A Rush For Departure | Forum

At 7:45 you have an important 90 minute flight boarding at the airport. You have a job interview you can not pass up. All is set up. All you need do is catch the flight they booked for you to show up on time for the 11 AM interview.

Day of.

The alarm set for 5:30 failed to go off. You wake up at 6:50. Still enough time, but it will be close.

As you wait for your Uber, you notice your driver is driving the wrong direction. You give it a second, but Ahakazahd keeps driving and then cancels. So you request another and that driver doesn't move for what seems like forever. You cancel and realize the time is now 7:13. You are now really glad you have TSA pre-check.

At this point you think, "Fuck it, It's one day of parking, I'll pay the god damn 80 dollars and leave it with the valet." You rush down to the elevator, the time is now 7:25. You get to your car and realize a nail you picked up left you with a flat. You can change a tire in five minutes and still do this. The airport is 12 minutes away.

What is your course of action and why?

Though it may be hard for like 5 of you, please indulge the world where this scenario took place as described.

If you wake up at 6:50 and boarding time is 7:45, just assume that you're screwed. Even at 12 minutes away you're going to arrive at the airport best case scenario 7:02(!) - sure, it's a 90 minute boarding, but don't count on that ever.

I? I call the people offering me the job immediately and tell them that I am not going to be able to make it. That's the first thing I do when I get out of bed. If you run into issues, you contact headquarters immediately.

Do NOT leave them in the dark assuming that everything is going according to plan when it isn't. These are people you are going to be working for, and they know that sometimes you're going to have difficulties doing the job they ask you to. What they look for is someone who has the integrity and courteousness to let them know as soon as possible when expectations may not be met.

They have a solid four hours advance notice. They might even be able to help you if you have the testicular fortitude to pick up a phone. It's just a phone call and, whether you know it or not, you're demonstrating that you can manage expectations.

The Uber? Not their problem. Your flat tire? Also not their problem. The Uber and flat tire issue - 'doesn't even happen per my course of action.

The sooner things aren't going according to plan and the sooner you manage up and speak-to that, the sooner you'll find a lot of these problems just go away.

Now, if you're talking a leave-building time of 7:30 and an arrival time 7:42(!?) - not including shuttle from parking to terminal, check in, TSA screening (which isn't always *that* fast*) for a boarding time of 7:45?

If you let it get this bad, may as well pull a hail marry. There's literally nothing at this point to lose. It might actually work, but hooooly shit did you ever make things harder for yourself than it needed to be.

Why I'm having troubling following this is, if I need to be at the airport at any time prior to noon, you can bet your ass I'm pulling an all night-er and napping in the departure terminal. I arrive at 3:00 am and, if I have to, just camp-out. Mingle. Whatever. Who cares. Hell! Arrive at the airport at midnight and get your sleep there. Wake up. Wash off. Get dressed. That's what you do.

You don't know what traffic is going to be like that morning, what car troubles may occur on the way there.

So yeah: 1) at the first sign of a set-back, you phone home. 2) plan waaay ahead so there won't be any set-backs. Adapt a mentality that says it's not the alarm's fault. It's not the Uber driver's fault, it's not the flat tire's fault - it's your own damn fault. Always. That's the harsh truth of agency.

He got the Idea from an Air Crah Investigation. Someone had a similar set of events take place leading up to them deciding that "something was telling them not to take that flight". Like in the movie Final Destination how the chick follows the dude freaking out off the plane, or a creepy real life (non-hollywood added) example from Apollo 13. Jim Lovell's wife really did lose her engagement ring down the hotel shower drain the morning of the launch.

And here is the theory behind it:

Consider the idiom, "when it rains, it pours".

My personal view is what I call a "luck equilibrium". If you consider the trajectory of the beneficial and adversarial (in reference to self) all has a middle ground of highs and lows. All you can do is slide where your median is, but you can't stop the 'Satan', so to speak.

It is my view that other lesser satan's always accompany the main event, usually like "foreshocks" of "GET THE FUCK OUT NOW!"

And the only thing divine seems to be our ability to think it might be coming. When the shit is coming everything ancillary turns with it.

This ties into a policy of mine: "Fail fast". The moment the plan isn't going according to plan: abort. "GET THE FUCK OUT NOW!" exactly. Unless that's the particular hill you're willing to die on, it's not going to get any better - that's for sure.

That one set-back is going to cause other set-backs down the chain and you're going to have to deal with that series of cascading set-backs already running in contingency mode. It's sub-optimal.

That's just no way to go about life.

And sure, I've gotten away with some wildly improbable disaterpieces, but I'm not a huge fan of relying on miracles.

Been there. A few times. Hell! I've even been detained at immigration, customs, a few times in various countries (as-in detained-detained... "come with us" type of detained). And I wasn't even doing anything! All sorts of crazy shit goes on in airport terminals and they don't give a care about your connecting flight. The more you keep rolling them bones, the more likely you're going to run into "it".

You want to as much padding time-wise as humanly possible. You know what happens if the TSA pulls you aside for extra screening and you miss the cut off time? You're SOL is what. So you plan for things to go wrong and at every juncture.